Sunday, January 11, 2009

There's a lot of stir around atheosphere about President-Elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren, and for a while, I agreed with most of it that it was truly a horrible choice and a bit of a slap in the face to those who elected him. However, Dale McGowan over at The Meming of Life has a really interesting take on it, and what he says has caused me to reevaluate the situation. Could it truly be a very different kind of politics, beyond just a change from the Bush administration and their neocon puppetmasters?

For all his wrongheadedness on key issues, Rick Warren has shown a willingness to reach across the aisle, to open lines of communication when others have refused, often angering his team in the process. Obama has seized this opening despite their differences. In so doing, he may help moderate evangelical attitudes toward him. By co-opting one of their generals with a gracious gesture of inclusion that goes beyond the usual tokenism, he has quite possibly made it easier to move forward on several fronts. And progress on those fronts matters much more than the opportunity to pack the inaugural moment with partisan purity.